Attention Scholars and Advocates of Military Veterans! 12/31 abstract deadline

By sharing your research with other military scholars from around the country and for readers around the world, you are expanding the public conversation surrounding the reality of military experience.

The Journal of Military Experience was designed for this purpose: to provide a venue for veterans transitioning into new lives as civilians and as academics. Known primarily for its creative writing and art, JME has published poetry, short stories, drawings, and paintings inspired by soldiers' experiences in the most recent of America's military engagements. Our intent has been to provide veterans with a cathartic, creative outlet to actively help them narrate their pasts in a healing way, while also educating non-veterans about military service. Veterans write to be understood. As they reach out to the country and the academic community, it is our job to respond in kind.

Therefore, the JME's second volume will offer a forum for scholars and supporters of the veteran community to join in conversations about veteran culture. Our editors have worked closely with military veterans accepted for publication, assisting them through the revision and editing process to vividly and, often, therapeutically represent their experiences. We want our veterans to be proud of publishing with the JME. This work reflects our personal desire to give back and to understand the nature of military service. We work hard to understand what our authors want from their works, just as many of you reading this call for papers have worked hard to understand the impact of military experience upon individuals and societies.

Telling one's story is only the first step in fully comprehending self and society; veterans must critically examine their military experience within the greater context of their life narratives to gain some semblance of control over who they were, who they are, and who they want to be. So that we might better invite this kind of critical reflection into our ongoing conversation, JME seeks to include scholarly essays that spark conversations with the journal's artistic representations of military life. To that end, the editors solicit researched essays that engage with military experience on a variety of levels. To facilitate your brainstorming, consider the following starter ideas:

Our goal in pairing scholarship, art, activism, and academic research is to encourage readers to reflect critically on both their own experiences as well as those shared in the journal; we hope to do that by providing our readership with essays which articulate provocative and useful theories and research for an audience as diverse as JME's readership is: academics, soldiers, families of soldiers, and those affiliated with neither academia nor the military. Publishing all of this information in one place fulfills the practical purpose of allowing scholars to interact directly with the selfsame subjects they're writing about, to allow a more transparent flow of communication among scholars, soldiers, veterans, and academics. This assures that veterans and soldiers have a say in the scholarship being written about them.

To propose a scholarly essay for the next volume of Journal of Military Experience, send a 1-page CV/resume and a 500-word abstract to the scholarship editor, Ami Blue (blueami@msu.edu) no later than December 31, 2011.